IDE

Item definition files, usually identified by the file extension .ide, are used to declare many different aspects for the map system or to specify special behaviour rules for one of the aspects. They are stored in plain text format, so that they can be opened by any text editing program (like Notepad), but there are also some tools to simplify editing.

Contents

Overview

The item definition files are split up into several sections. There is no order on how you arrange the sections. Also you do not need to use all the sections in a file.

Format and syntax description

The basic structure of the different sections is pretty simple. Each section starts with a four-character section identifier indicating how the content of the section gets interpreted by the game. The identifier is followed by the definition entries. Each entry takes one line and every line follows certain rules which are described in the articles handling the sections in detail (see below). However lines can also be empty or commented. If so they get ignored by the games' parser. The end of every section are indicated by the terminating string "end". Both (section identifier and terminating string) are not case sensitive, but by default they are written in lower case.

Comments are usually indicated by the character # (number sign). It is possible to add comments to the end of a line, but breaking the line format for the current section using comments may cause the game to crash during loading. It is recommended that a comment should be placed on a separate line. Comments can also be placed outside of sections.

Lines itself are always formatted in the same way differing only in the number of their parameters describing the semantical content of the line. Parameters are usually separated by the character , (comma). Whitespace characters at the beginning or the end of an parameter get trimmed but they are usually used to give the content a more clear structure to make it more easier to read for human. Strings can be encased by the character " (quotation mark), but this is optional and rarely used by default. Also the games' parser uses an invariant culture to parse numerical values and strings. Which means strings are ASCII encrypted and the decimal separator is . (period).

Section example

objs
...
end

Sections

The following table contains basic information about all known sections. For additional information read the articles itself.

Basicly does the same as OBJS, but it has two additional parameters defining the ingame time range the object can get rendered.Those objects get placed inside the INST section of the item placement files.

Basicly does the same as OBJS, but it has one additional parameter identicating an IFP or WAD animation file to assign an animation to the object.Those objects get placed inside the INST section of the item placement files.

Used to create interiors. This section does also contain information about the entrace markers (previous ENEX connections) and dimensions of the interior which influences certain aspects, like the weather, for example. All objects are placed relative to an offset placed using MLO+ inside the IPL or WPL file.

IDE Flags

Flags are used in order to specify the behaviour of objects. They are interpreted as signed 32-bit integer values where each bit describes a boolean value of a different aspect. The following table shows the standard flags used for objects defined in OBJS, TOBJ and ANIM section.

For flags defining different aspects of different definitions read the articles about their sections.

Difference between GTA III and GTA IV engines

Grand Theft Auto IV not only uses different formats to the previous games, it also does not use IDs to identify objects anymore. While Grand Theft Auto III era games use an ID as an index inside an array of definitions, GTA IV uses the hashes of the model name as a key inside a hash table. For more information about this see Map System.

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